I have no time for
everyday platitudes
unreflected blurtings
spewed opinions
shallow observations
unthought-through comments
ambiguous meanings, and
short-sighted insights.
I have no time to
waste on prejudices
deal with inanity
wrestle with obscurity
take nonsense seriously
fight against stupidity
accept obscurity or
eschew obfuscation.
I have no time,
nor interest
nor desire
nor will
nor longing
nor yearning
nor hope
that much will change.
There a quite a few people I know who yearn for the "good old days", you know, those times when the world was still OK. Most people are referring to their childhoods, and for those I've known since then, I can tell you that the times then weren't all that great.
But, we think they were (or at least like to think they were). Our perception of them over the passage of times makes them appear that they were. Most of all, we wish they were. Hindsight is 20-20. Time heals all wounds. Or, as Heraclitus noted, Time is a game played beautifully by children.
We are, however, no longer children. The relentlessness of the seeming endless march through morning, noon, and night. Our continual obsession with the past, our total ignorance of the present, and our self-induced fear of the future haunt us mercilessly. And we think that somehow time moves unerringly from some point in the past toward that most-feared point in the future, death. Then we remember, sometimes only fleeting, how beautifully we played the game of time when we were children.
What bothers most of us and what bothers us most is the fact that it seems to be moving faster, that it seems to be slipping away from us. We invented clocks to mark the hours and somehow know that a minute then was really no different from a minute now, but it certainly seems different. We all know that as we grow older our sensation of time accelerates, and given the fact that our lives are now driven by the clock, it seems all the worst. And then we find ourselves wasting time, even (ruthlessly) killing time ... how sick do we have to get before we realize that we've that we no longer have any idea how the time game is played.
So here we are, all grown up; our own persons; doing our own thing and making our own decisions; pretending to be large and in charge, bragging that we've paid our dues and know how to play the game ... but that's a much different game we think we know how to play. Sure, there are lots of folks who can play the get-what-you-want game, the pulling-the-wool game, the talk-big game, the act-brave game, and many more besides. But the real game, the most important game of all is the one we forgot how to play.
Too bad, too sad, it was the most fun game of all.
When beliefs become collective and unquestioned, they become a danger to us all. It doesn't matter if they are social, cultural, economic or religious. The result is always the same: massive death and destruction. I would like to think that we, as a species, are smarter than to keep falling for the same delusions, but I'm having a hard time maintaining that belief in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.
When we were looking at individual beliefs and knowledge, it was clear that this overshadowing threat was simply not present. For all intents and purposes, it really doesn't matter what any one of us, what any given individual, believes. It does not have a significant, and certainly not a negative impact on the world at large (though any misguided individual can wreak a lot of havoc and cause a lot of harm). The problem arose when too many people bought into a given ideology without critically questioning where the beliefs should lead. In all of the examples cited, there was one common feature that was the ideologies ultimate undoing, namely its focus on one particular group to the exclusion of others.
All of these ideologies are drenched in us-vs.-them thinking. It can be the Master Race, or the Master Class, or the Greatest Country in the World ... it doesn't matter: each and every one of these belief systems, these ideologies, is exclusionary. Any individual or any group who is not part of the "elect" will either be forced to acknowledge the superiority of the "true believers" or they will be forced to pay the price for non-believing. Isn't there a way to avoid this pitfall? I would like to think there is, but I'm convinced it can't be found in the ideologies themselves. It can only be found within ourselves as individuals.
This is the reason that I suggested not long ago that an alternative to reading this summer might be some intense or serious reflection. I don't think it's a bad thing at all when we are sure, when we have reasons, when we can make clear to others what we believe. We can (and should) do this independent of anything that anyone else might think. We don't need to belong to a group, formal or informal, we only need to be ourselves and be aware of our own, individual approach to life. We need to be sure of ourselves and in doing so, we become an inspiration, or a role model, for others.
But where does one start? Anywhere is fine. You can start with your economic or political or social or cultural beliefs. It doesn't matter. The most basic question is "why do I believe
It is very likely that none of us individually can solve the world's problems. The good thing is, we don't have to. We've all got more than enough to do with getting our own houses (selves) in order. If you're having trouble making sense of everything "out there", the least you can do is try to make sense of whatever you find "in here".
Tomorrow, at 16:39 UTC (or 4:39pm Universal Coordinated Time for those of you not yet in the 21st century) the sun will stop (which is what the word "solstice" actually means). In the Northern Hemisphere it marks the longest day and shortest night of the year, astronomically the real beginning of summer, but for those with other modes of time reckoning, mid-summer. Especially in places that are dark a lot, it is a day of merriment and celebration.
Solstices occur when the sun is at its zenith; that is, at its highest point, in relation to the earth's equator. Humankind has known about them for almost as long as there have been humans on this planet, and in our earliest civilizations they played a special and significant role. It was nature that determined how we calculated and counted our notions of time, not according to the averaging of the frequencies of certain isotopes of uranium selected for this particular purpose (which is how our most precise time is established.
Still, Mother Nature, the Cosmos, doesn't really care how sophisticated we humans think we are. On 30 June this year 23:59:60 UTC (midnight, in common terms), a leap second will be added to UTC in order to synchronize atomic clocks with astronomical time to within 0.9 seconds. Oh, how proud we must be. OK, I'm enough of a geek to find this kind of stuff cool, but what really fascinates me about it is what it says about us as a species. We humans have the privilege and benefit of being able to reflect upon such things, even if the vast majority of us (a) don't know that such things even exist and (b) when we do, we simply fail to take advantage of it.
The summer solstice, of course, is the counterpart to the other yearly solstice, the one in winter. That one is much more well known (though barely) because it occurs near to Christmas and the winter festivities have stuck with us longer. Occurring exactly half a year apart, they have different meanings, primarily because of the physical differences that we denizens of this planet experience at these particular times. The festivals of the winter solstice, throughout history, have been spiritual ones; the summer ones, physical: lots of drinking, dancing, cavorting, merry-making ... like in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. We should remember, however, that things are exactly opposite in the Southern Hemisphere. There it is winter that starts and they should be celebrating their spiritual festivals, but they aren't going to be doing so for the most part because Northern Hemisphereans colonized the Southern Hemisphere and decided that everyone needed to be just like us.
It's really sad when you stop to think about it: one half of the earth was moving from the spiritual to the physical while at the same time the other half was moving in the opposite direction. The earth, as it were, was really a giant, living Ying-Yang. But we found a way to change it and work against the flow of time and nature that had served the planet for billions of years. And look at us now. Now wonder the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still" only became a cult classic. That was a film about know-it-alls who were making life miserable for others. And that's what we do best.
Perhaps, in part, because we started ignoring the days the sun stops.
Ideologies are dangerous things, very dangerous. Even if they start out with good intentions, I don't know of a one that ever turned out to everyone's benefit. The reason for this is while they start out in "beliefs" they don't necessarily turn into "faiths". That's merely the religious trajectory. Yes, all religions are ideologies, to be sure, but not all ideologies are religions (even if they appear so to non-adherents).
History is full of ideologies, but they taken to new levels (of nefariousness) in the 20th century and are getting even more dangerous in the 21st. You'd think by now we'd recognize what is happening, but apparently we don't. We need to get smart quickly, however, or we could be in for really big trouble.
The classic example of an ideology is Nazism: a troubled connection between fascism (an economic belief) combined with a religious reverence for a certain mythology (a cultural belief) with a good portion of pseudo-science based on language and blood lines (a socio-biological belief). Yes, it has a little bit of everything and came close to destroying the world. Another, more recent one is Communism (though we should properly call this Leninism or Stalinism), which was primarily economic and social in its expression. And, most recently (and we're still on the secular side of things), we have neoliberalism (economic beliefs) or American exceptionalism (cultural beliefs). What they all have in common is a blind belief in certain precepts, none of which are supported or substantiated by hard facts, by hard evidence. What is more, in each of these examples, we are told there is evidence but we are never shown it. We are told that this or that ideology is correct, but the "proof", the demonstrations, the evidence is never, ever specific. It is a general statement, often amounting to "and what's the alternative?". In fact, neoliberalism is based solely on this argument, made most vehemently by Margaret Thatcher: "TINA (there is no alternative)"! Yet, there is plenty of hard evidence as to why any one of these ideologies is simply wrong.
This is, of course, the heart of the matter. As we saw a few posts ago, when our individual beliefs are threatened or challenged, we simply fall back to defending them. We simply disregard (or try to discredit) the evidence. The same is true of our collective beliefs; that is, of our ideologies. This is an all the more dangerous situation in that no one individual is responsible for the consequences, and there always are consequences: with Nazism it was obvious (Holocaust, devastating world war), with Communism too (state terror, the gulag, millions of deaths). The same holds, if we're honest, with neoliberalism (see Pinochet in Chile, the disparity between rich and poor, the economic subjection and killing of, well, millions worldwide) and American exceptionalism (Iraq and Afghan wars, the drone program; that is, millions of deaths). And I don't even need to address religious ideologies; one of our more poignant current problems.
Personally, I think it's hard not to associate massive death with ideologies, and it is obvious that they are massively dangerous. It's time to break ranks. It's time to get our own, individual thoughts and beliefs straight. It is way past due that we take the time to figure out just what it is that we believe.
One of things I learned very quickly while studying at a German university (though I had, in a somewhat lighter mode, been exposed to the approach in my undergraduate days in the States) is that if you are going to use terms (or, better, "concepts", "notions", etc.) you should be clear on what you mean by them. This applied just a well to new, technical terms as it did to everyday concepts as well. As I've been bantering around one such term in the past few posts, I thought it might be worthwhile to use it as an example of what I'm talking about.
The word I've been using, of course, is "belief". We all know what it means, regardless of what might be in the dictionary (for, after all, dictionaries are not authorities, rather they are the documentation of what is generally accepted at a given point in time ... words change meanings over time, which is another reason why it's good to stop and think hard about them every once in a while, like I'm doing now). One method of helping to make definitions and understandings clear is to compare or contrast them to similar terms and notions. One such helpful term in this case would be "knowledge". In other words, what do the two ideas have in common, but perhaps more importantly how they are different. Let's take a look.
A "belief" is something we think is true. We are convinced, for any number of reasons (or for no reason at all) that what we believe is true. It's "how things are" or "what something means" or anything along that line. By contrast, knowledge is something that we know is true. We are convinced in particular because there is some kind of verifiable evidence that others are aware of and acknowledge and hence we agree is "how things are" or "what something means". It would seem that the difference between "belief" and "knowledge" is the difference between thinking and knowing.
This difference is subtle, to be sure, but it is important. Others may believe what we believe; that is, others are aware of something and acknowledge it, yet the difference lies in the fact that the "evidence" is missing. Oh, believers may even believe they have evidence, but upon closer examination we find that it is not hard and fast evidence, rather it is an indication, a phenomenon of sorts, that the believers interpret in some way. To be fair, on the hard-evidence side, there is often data that needs to be interpreted, but here there are often strict rules of interpretation to assist in the interpretation process.
In the general and normal course of everyday life, this fine distinction isn't always that important, but it is becoming increasingly so, and for all the wrong reasons. When people have beliefs that contradict knowledge and insist that their beliefs are more significant/important/convincing/correct than knowledge, we have a bit of a problem. When beliefs go from being mere beliefs to this stage we can safely speak of ideologies, rather than mere beliefs. An ideology is, then, a set of beliefs (a way of thinking) that has been elevated to absolutivity; that is, it is presented as if it is knowledge. But, it simply is not.
Too many public discussions and too many decisions these days are being based on ideologies, not knowledge, and it's starting to become a serious problem.
While I do have my optimistic moments, I'm not the fool many take me for. I know well that most people I know wouldn't read much that is antithetical to their beliefs. The authors of those texts might have a point ... who knows? they might even be right ... and what do you do then? When our beliefs are challenged, the vast majority of us simply reject what we're being told (or what we're reading). It's a lot easier to simply deny than it is to change our minds. How sad is that.
Having said that, however, I'm not convinced that most people know why they believe what they believe. A lot of our beliefs are simply carry-overs from our childhood. Our parents believed certain things, we accepted them, and we believe them now as well. In our teen and young-adult years, our friends or people we admired or looked up to believed things and we decided to believe what they believed because we thought or felt or believed that we were like them. In our adult lives, we believe things sometimes simply because we would like things to be a certain way; our world would be much less threatening and stressful if things are as we believe. What all of these modes of coming-to-beliefs have in common, it is clear, is that they are passive in nature. We don't have to do anything to come to these beliefs, we merely need to accept them and make them our own.
That's fine in as far as it goes, but it's a rather weak foundation, especially when we think of how many people are out there claiming, arguing, hammering home, and trying to impose their beliefs on others. If someone wants to make a strong case for his or her beliefs, then I would like to think that they had at least thought about them seriously, that they had invested some energy in understanding what it is they believe and that they knew why they believed what they believed. Unfortunately, that's hardly ever the case. Beliefs are funny like that: all you have to do is believe them. Personally, I prefer people with convictions (thought-through and grounded beliefs), even if I don't share them myself.
So, now that summer is upon us, and now that many of us are thinking about time off or vacations or just lying out in the sun or going to the beach, I have little illusion that most of you will be taking a book with you. For those who are, I commend you, and I certainly hope you read it. For those of you who are not choosing that option, may I suggest a less strenuous, but I believe more challenging, and, perhaps, even more rewarding activity: reflecting. Yes, why not take the time in which you're not really doing anything else, and think about what you believe. Ask yourself why you believe it. Do little thought experiments about what it would be like, or what the world would be like, if you, or most people or anyone else, didn't believe what you believe. You really ought to try it. It can be a very enlightening experience, if done intensely and seriously enough.
No one's asking you to do anything but think ... about what you think and why. Who thinks they can handle it?
But WE; that is, those of us in the Western World; get ours at the expense of the rest of humanity, but, hey, don't let me spoil your fun. While you're relaxing, just letting your soul dangle, as the Germans say, you shouldn't really just turn off your mind. Let's face it: most of you rarely find the time to turn it on in normal, everyday life, what with kids and school and activities and work and bills and mortgages and doctor's appointments and re-landscaping the garden and washing the car, or whatever it is that "consumes" our own consumerist lives.
So, in those odd moments between rolling over to have the "other side browned" or between sun-screen latherings or just shifting your position in the hammock, I'd like to suggest a couple of things for your summer reading list. No, it's not light fare, no action-packed, thriller, mind-numbing, unrealistic fantasy. Rather, just a little bit of actual reality to gently challenge that perceptual illusion you think is "real life".
Since we in the West have traded in our societies for economies, it is only fitting that economic topics top the list.
Don't get me wrong ... I'm not foolish enough to think that any of you are really going to read anything this serious, but I couldn't help but at least bring the subject up. You do want a break, I'm sure, and you feel you deserve a break, too. I'm only saying that you can "take a break" now, or you can be surprised, shocked, and overwhelmed when the real break comes.
We're at a critical juncture in history, folks. Something has to and is going to give, and in not the all-too-distant future. I pray that all of you reading this today will be around to experience it. You're not going to like it. You are going to be angry and enraged, you are all going to find yourself asking how this could possibly come about, how couldn't we have known this was going to happen. But you'll only have yourself to blame. You had the chance to find out, but you decided you needed a break.
Enjoy!
"For whom the bell tolls" is a well-known and much used phrase in the English language. In 1940, Ernest Hemingway wrote a novel with that title, and he, in turn, took it from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,"Meditation XVII" which was published in 1624. Yes, the notion's be around for a while.
For most people in most places, tolling bells are a rarity. Oh sure, on Sunday you hear them a lot, but otherwise? In the little town I live in here in Southern Germany, however, you get to hear the bells a lot. There is a single small bell rung once at a quarter past the hour, twice at the half hour, three times and a quarter till the hour, and four times at the full hour. The the large bell chimes in tolling the hour itself. And, this goes on 24 hours every day of every year, that is, 365 days normally and 366 times in a leap year, for a grand total of 144,50 and 144,936 times, respectively. And this doesn't take into consideration the other times the bells are rung, such as before and after worship services or mass, the 3 o'clock ringing when someone in the community dies, or especially the three-minute continuous ringing at 7:00 am, noon and 6:00 pm (or 3 pm on Saturdays), which marks the starting, middle, and end of the workday.
The churches do the ringing (we have both Protestant and Catholic churches here), but it's not a church thing anymore. Pope Sabenius is credited with having the bells ring to mark the passage of the hours. They had always called to prayers and to mass, but this was something different, this was, as Gebser put it, the haptification of time, concretizing it, making time physical. I suppose the idea was to make us more aware of time and what we're doing with it.
We're only granted a limited amount of time during our sojourn on the planet, that's for sure. We were supposed to have learned, in school and elsewhere, that rare resources should be used with extreme care, but just like we're destroying our planet as a whole (like we had another one we could move to), we tend to waste most what we have the least of. We humans are simply downright weird like that.
So, when all is said and done, each and every time we hear a bell toll, we should think of Mr. Donne. We needn't ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for each and every one of us, and it should remind us of how precious time and life are. Too bad we hear them anymore. Well, I do, I must admit, thousands of times a year.
As a kid, I remember the family going down to the orchard at the main crossroads not far from our house, taking along our own cider jugs to buy gallons of freshly made cider (and drinking what we could while we were there) because that was the only time of year you could get it. After all, they were local apples and they didn't ripen until fall. End of story. Now, you can get any kind of apple juice you want any time you want it, and so it's not special anymore. Not much is special anymore. And when nothing is special, nothing is appreciated. When nothing is appreciated, nothing is valued. It simply diminishes our lives.
Another important, and for me, favorite, time of year is the late summer/early fall when the wine is harvested. Of course, that's only really significant to those of us who live in wine-growing regions, though I'm sure that each region has its own special products or customs. At any rate, it is at harvest time that we get new wine, and along with it, the local bakers start making onion and other quiches, because that's what you eat when you're drinking new wine. We only get them at that time of year, and there is a deeply satisfying and enriching feeling when you have them because you know that you haven't had them for a year and it's going to be another year before you get them again. These are aromas, tastes, sensations and feelings that happen only in 12-month intervals.
That our lives plays out in cycles is nothing new. The Ancients knew it and in fact entire civilizations endured for millennia based primarily on this simple principle. Don't get me wrong: I have no intention or desire to "turn back the clock" (an interesting phrase in itself) to an earlier age. I'm not making the case that there was a time when things were simply better. What I am saying is that recognizing and acknowledging the cycles of life enriches our individual lives. It's really very simple.
To be sure, globalization is taking its toll. We're so overwhelmed with everything anytime and anywhere that we can't tell the difference between what is and what is not, what is meaningful and what is merely mundane. We don't mark our times, our pathway through the year. We aren't aware of the cycles of nature and we're the poorer in spirit, if nothing else, because of it.
